Talk:Ionic meter

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English examples[edit]

Bravo, Wareh. But now I see why ionics are not something you'd want to do for lines on end in English except for special effect. So The Countess Cathleen is a verse drama? (I don't know Yeats' plays.) You'd never know that from the play's article; would your sources permit you to add a sentence there to that effect? Cynwolfe (talk) 21:48, 10 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it is a verse drama, and I'll try to add some mention of this. The 1907 Poetical Works, vol. 2, prints it as one of his "five dramas in verse." Then it had the Oona's song of Fergus in Act II, quoted here (the dialogue is in blank verse). But the play underwent many changes over the years, and the version widespread on the internet (with the line breaks disappeared, making it look like prose) is the final version of 1912 ("a complete revision to make it suitable for performance at the Abbey Theatre"). Wareh (talk) 02:25, 11 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've now added a decent bit over at The Countess Cathleen. From the metrical point of view, note that the striking line I quote here is a variant of the regular iambic tetrameter in the song. If English thought in terms of four-syllable iambic metra, then a bean-counting metrician could call it anaclasis, though it strikes me more as a kind of compensated syncopation -- I notice first of all that I'm getting ¯ ^ ¯ for ¯ ˘ ¯. It'll be interesting to see how it feels different with Joyce's music, which I plan as tonight's bedtime song for the kids. Wareh (talk) 20:02, 11 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How wonderful! Despite my love for Yeats as a poet (my favorite dead English-language poet), I've never spent any time with his plays, only been dimly aware of them. I'm reminded of a passage in Pound, I think in the Cantos, where he recalls hearing Yeats upstairs going over a line of poetry out loud, something about a peacock (naturally), the eye of a peacock … well, that's what Google is for, isn't it? The point being orality as a basis for Yeats' poetry, and working in the classical tradition where poetry and drama, though you would specialize in one or the other, were more closely complementary in composition and aesthetics. Cynwolfe (talk) 13:56, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]